We begin with this unusual event: Today in 1978, the members of Aerosmith bailed out 30 of their fans who were arrested at their concert in Fort Wayne, Ind., for smoking marijuana:
Britain’s number one single today in 1987:
Today in 1992 on NBC-TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” Sinead O’Connor torpedoed her own career:
This was the last call Vin Scully made for a game at Dodger Stadium …
… and today he is announcing the final game in a career that included this …
… and this …
… and this …
… and this:
Today in 1953, Victor Borge’s “Comedy in Music” opened on Broadway, closing 849 performances later. (Pop.)
Today in 1960, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs released “Stay,” which would become the shortest number one single of all time:
The number one single today in 1965:
I present the number one single today in 1977 to demonstrate that popularity and quality are not always synonymous:
The number one single today in 1983:
Today in 2004, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne officially opened AC/DC Lane, named for the band, to the bagpipes from …
Birthdays begin with actor Richard Harris, who “sang” …
My high school political science teacher posted on his blog:
In “A Cheap, Easy High—With No Side Effects” Patrick Kurp refers to Terry Teachout’s “post devoted to the music he listens to whenever he feels ‘the urgent need to upgrade my mood.’ He writes, ‘I’ve always found music to be one of the most potent means of attitude adjustment known to man,’ and his experience jibes with mine. …. Music’s impact is prompt and unambiguous. In contrast, literature is an oral ingestion of medicine compared to the intravenous immediacy of music.” Kurp goes on to list some of the works of literature that invariably lift his mood. For instance:
- Most anything by…P.G. Wodehouse
- Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation
- Tristram Shandy, especially the scenes with Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman
- The essays of Joseph Epstein and Guy Davenport
- Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower” and “The Lady’s Dressing Room”
Teachout’s list of music that provides “a cheap, easy high” is long. A few of the many he listed:
- Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”
- The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek”
- Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture
- Gershwin’s An American in Paris
- Copland’s “Buckaroo Holiday” (from Rodeo)
- The Who’s “Shakin’ All Over” (from Live at Leeds)
- Sidney Bechet’s 1932 recording of “Maple Leaf Rag”
- Mendelssohn’s Rondo capriccioso
- The first movement of Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488
- Steely Dan’s “My Old School”
- Flatt and Scruggs’ “Farewell Blues”
- Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide”
- The first movement of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony
- Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus Overture
- Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Three little maids from school are we” (from The Mikado)
- Pretty much anything by Count Basie, Erroll Garner, Fats Waller, Haydn, or John Philip Sousa
In case you haven’t heard of them, I linked to them up to the last bullet point:
(Side note: A lot of Wisconsin high schools use “On Wisconsin,” when they could use a Sousa march as their fight song.)
Teachout also listed (and I have linked to):
The Obama administration and some economists argue that the recovery since the Great Recession ended in 2009 has been unusually weak because of the recession’s severity and the fact that it was accompanied by a major financial crisis. Yet in a recent study of economic downturns in the U.S. and elsewhere since 1870, economist Tao Jin and I found that historically the opposite has been true. Empirically, the growth rate during a recovery relates positively to the magnitude of decline during the downturn.
In our paper, “Rare Events and Long-Run Risks,” we examined macroeconomic disasters in 42 countries, featuring 185 contractions in GDP per capita of 10% or more. These contractions are dominated by wartime devastation such as World War I (1914-18) and World War II (1939-45) and financial crises such as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many are global events, some are for individual or a few countries.
On average, during a recovery, an economy recoups about half the GDP lost during the downturn. The recovery is typically quick, with an average duration around two years. For example, a 4% decline in per capita GDP during a contraction predicts subsequent recovery of 2%, implying 1% per year higher growth than normal during the recovery. Hence, the growth rate of U.S. per capita GDP from 2009 to 2011 should have been around 3% per year, rather than the 1.5% that materialized.
Arguing that the recovery has been weak because the downturn was severe or coincided with a major financial crisis conflicts with the evidence, which shows that a larger decline predicts a stronger recovery. Moreover, many of the biggest downturns featured financial crises. For example, the U.S. per capita GDP growth rate from 1933-40 was 6.5% per year, the highest of any peacetime interval of several years, despite the 1937 recession. This strong recovery followed the cumulative decline in the level of per capita GDP by around 29% from 1929-33 during the Great Depression.
Given the lack of recovery in GDP, a surprising aspect of the post-2009 period is the strong employment growth. The growth rate of total nonfarm payrolls averaged 1.7% a year from February 2010 to July 2016, despite the drop in the labor-force participation rate. The post-2009 period is not a jobless recovery; it is a job-filled non-recovery. Similarly, the drop in the unemployment rate—from 10% in October 2009 to 4.9% in July 2016—has been impressive, though overstated because of the decrease in labor-force participation.
What accounts for the strong recovery in the labor market combined with the non-recovery in GDP? Mainly weak growth of labor productivity. The growth rate of GDP per worker from 2010-15 was 0.5% per year, compared with 1.5% from 1949 to 2009. The recent productivity slowdown is clear since 2011 but may have started as early as 2004.
What could have promoted a faster recovery by enhancing productivity growth? Variables that encourage economic growth include strong rule of law and property rights, free trade, rolling back inefficient regulations and other constraints on market activity, public infrastructure such as highways and airports, strong institutions for education and health, fiscal discipline (including a moderate ratio of public debt to GDP), efficient taxation, and sound monetary policy as reflected in low and stable inflation.
The main U.S. policy used to counter the Great Recession was increased government transfer payments. Federal social benefits to persons as a ratio to GDP went from 8.7% in 2007 to 11.7% in 2010, then fell to 10.9% in 2015. The main increases applied to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security (including disability) and food stamps, whereas unemployment insurance first rose then fell. Unfortunately, increased transfer payments do not promote productivity growth.
The 2007-08 financial crisis was also followed by vast monetary expansion involving increases in the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve and other central banks. The Fed’s expansion featured a dramatic rise in excess reserves, used to fund increased holdings of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. Remarkably, the strong monetary growth came without inflation.
The absence of inflation is surprising but may have occurred because weak opportunities for private investment motivated banks and other institutions to hold the Fed’s added obligations despite the negative real interest rates paid. In this scenario, the key factor is the flight to quality stimulated by the heightened perceived risk in private investment.Given the need for productivity-enhancing policies, it is sad that recent policy suggestions from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have emphasized restrictions on trade and immigration and higher minimum wages. The former policies are equivalent to constraining technological progress. Expanded trade in goods and people is like better technology—both raise the total real value of goods and services that can be produced for given inputs. Mandating a higher minimum wage amounts to inefficient regulation of the labor market by pricing young and less-productive workers out of the job market.
At this point, it is hard to imagine U.S. policy makers participating in serious policy discussions aimed at promoting economic growth. But maybe I am too pessimistic—after all, the report on the U.S. fiscal situation in 2010 by the Simpson-Bowles Commission was very good. Too bad the Obama administration ignored it.
Employment growth? What employment growth? As measured by the best of a bad set of measures — the U6 measure of unemployment and underemployment — 10 percent of Americans are not fully employed, and that measure doesn’t even fully measure the number of Americans who have stopped looking for full-time employment because it doesn’t exist. A Republican president would be lynched with that kind of craptacular employment.
Peter Wehner writes about author C.S. Lewis on something religious leaders who publicly support political candidates (particularly the non-religious Donald Trump) need to read:
In 1951, Lewis — the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, Oxford don, medievalist, lecturer on philosophy and the leading Christian apologist in the 20th century — declined an offer from Winston Churchill to recommend him for an honorary Commander of the British Empire. “There are always knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance on the Honours List wd. of course strengthen their hands,” Lewis replied. He would not allow vanity and misplaced political ambitions to discredit his public witness.
As this dispiriting election year has shown, there are many politically prominent Christians today who should think and act more like Lewis.
He was known to have “contempt for politics and politicians,” in the words of his brother Warnie, and he steered clear of the political controversies of his time. Yet as Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson, associate professors at the University of Missouri and Calvin College, show in their groundbreaking new book, C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law, Lewis’s understanding of truth and human nature, of what constitutes the good life and the good society, had significant political implications.
Lewis saw public matters, and indeed all of life, through a theological lens; his Christian belief had important public consequences because it provided him with insights into the human condition.
Lewis also believed in objective moral truth and considered subjectivism a grave threat to civilization. “If your moral ideas can be true, and those of the Nazis less true,” Lewis wrote in 1952, “there must be something — some Real Morality — for them to be true about.” The moral law, he argued, was revealed in nature and known by reason.
Professors Dyer and Watson write that Lewis had “a very limited view of government’s role and warrant,” was skeptical of its capacity to inculcate virtue and worried about its paternalistic tendencies. The duty of government was to restrain wrongdoing. Because he believed in the fallen nature of humanity, Lewis was concerned by the concentration of political power. “It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects — military, political, economic, and what not,” Lewis wrote. “But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.”
Lewis was wary of “morals legislation.” For example, during a period when the criminalization of homosexuality was considered by many to be justified, Lewis asked, “What business is it of the State’s?” Nor did he believe it was the duty of government to promote the Christian ideal of marriage. “A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone,” he wrote in “Mere Christianity.” “I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives.”
“Lewis was committed to classical liberalism in the tradition of John Locke and John Stuart Mill,” according to Professors Dyer and Watson, meaning he believed in the wisdom of limited government, equality under the law, and a robust private sphere. Lewis also presciently warned that Christians were tempted to abuse political power in ways that were bad for both Christianity and the state. He believed that theocracy was the worst form of government and detested the idea of a “Christian party,” which risked blaspheming the name of Christ.
“The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal, is always great,” Lewis wrote. “The demon inherent in every party is at all times ready enough to disguise himself as the Holy Ghost; the formation of a Christian Party means handing over to him the most efficient makeup we can find.”
Lewis knew that a faith-informed conscience could advance justice and that Christianity played an enormous part in establishing the concept of natural rights and the dignity of the human person. But he also believed that legislation is not an exact science; that a Christian citizen does not, in the words of Professors Dyer and Watson, “have the authority to represent his or her prudential judgment as required by Christianity”; and that no political party can come close to approximating God’s ideal. Christianity is about ends, not means, according to Lewis, and so he spent a good deal of his life articulating what he believed was the telos, the ultimate purpose, of human beings. Lewis was convinced that partisan political engagement often undermined that effort.
For those of us who believe in the truth of Christianity and still believe in the good of politics, the last several decades — and the last 15 months in particular — have often been painful. Like water that refracts light and changes the shape of things, politics can distort and invert Christianity, turning a faith that at its core is about grace, reconciliation and redemption into one that is characterized by bitterness, recriminations and lack of charity. There is a good deal of hating and dehumanization going on in the name of Christ.
Followers of Jesus aren’t doing a very good job of living faithfully in a broken world, perhaps because we’re looking inward instead of upward. “Aim at heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in,’ ” Lewis reminded us. “Aim at earth and you will get neither.”
The number eight song today in 1958:
Today in 1967, the Beatles mixed “I Am the Walrus,” which combined three songs John Lennon had been writing. The song includes the sounds of a radio going up and down the dial, ending at a BBC presentation of William Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Lennon had read that a teacher at his primary school was having his students analyze Beatles lyrics, Lennon reportedly added one nonsensical verse, although arguably none of the verses make much sense:
The number 71 …
… number 51 …
… number 27 …
… number 20 …
… number eight …
… number six …
… number three …
… and number one singles today in 1973:
Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D.:
“Implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police,” said Hillary Clinton during the presidential debate.
Excuse me? Maybe you’re a racist, Mrs. Clinton, but speak for yourself. Of course, would you ever admit to being a racist? Not a chance. Yet your statement implies that everyone, yourself included, is one.
How can one prove that one is NOT a racist? It’s impossible, because you cannot prove a negative. Imagine that I said to you, “You killed my dog,” and you replied in horror, “No I didn’t.” Rationally and objectively, the burden would be on me to provide proof–via facts and evidence–that you did, in fact, kill my dog. It would be logically impossible (and psychologically unbearable) for you to try and prove you did not kill my dog.
(I would have used the example “You cheated on your wife” myself. Of course, Mr. Hillary would have replied, “What’s your point?”, so never mind.)
It’s the same with racism. People like Hillary Clinton claim everyone is racist. It’s like we can’t help it. It’s in our genes (we’re told). Particularly if you’re white. More so if you’re white and male. Absolutely if you’re anything other than a progressive and a socialist.
Although Hillary Clinton damns herself by saying that everyone engages in “implicit racism,” you already know what her self-exoneration consists of: “Well, I have spent decades tirelessly working for the poor and disadvantaged of all races.”
No such thing is true. She has worked tirelessly at achieving and maintaining power over others, and using people’s sometimes legitimate sense of being a victim (due to race, or other factors) as a way to exploit their vulnerabilities, ignorance or weakness in the name of achieving power.
How do you know if you’re a racist? It all depends on how you view individuals. If you recognize people for their individuality alone, then you’re not a racist. Race is either a non-existent factor, or a marginal one, in your appraisal of people in everyday life. If someone is your doctor, you care about what kind of doctor he or she is, not the race. If someone is your car mechanic or friend, it’s the same. If someone is your friend or spouse, it’s the same. People are appreciated or disparaged for the presence or lack of character, personality traits or competence. When this is how you view the world, then you’re no longer (or never were) a racist.
It’s not human nature to be racist. It’s actually human nature to wish to survive. When focusing on survival and (once that’s settled) enjoyment of life, it does not serve one’s interest to practice racism. People only fall into the trap of racism or irrational discrimination when they started out in the trap of viewing people as members of collectives, rather than individuals. Individualism liberates human beings from the mentality of tribalism, and it’s only individualism that will extinguish racism.
Hillary Clinton is no individualist.
Individualism is the complete opposite of racism. Clinton does everything in her power to encourage people to think of themselves as members of a class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever other type of group serves the interest of pursuing power. She has a vested power (and money) interest in doing so. Anyone who believes her crap is beyond foolish.
Hillary Clinton seems about to obtain what she considers the most important quest for power one would ever attain: the U.S. presidency. The irony? That office only holds value, esteem and power because of people who believed in very different kinds of ideas than she does … ideas such as economic freedom, the right to bear arms, the right to freedom of association and speech.
Like Obama and many others who put socialism, pressure group politics and the pursuit of personal power above the preservation of the rights of the individual, Clinton will bring to the office lower credibility than ever before. Her corrupt dealings in the Clinton Foundation, bad as they are, will be the least of it. In fact, by the time she’s done with the presidency, there might be little point to being a U.S. President.
The primacy of the individual is something Republicans used to believe, until Donald Trump ran for president.
Mark French is similarly unpersuaded about how racist and sexist we are because:
… equality is equality. If a man or woman steps up to occupy the White House as a major party candidate, in my mind, they themselves are primae facie evidence that racism or sexism isn’t as powerful a force as is being argued. A woman can’t drive or be out alone, much less run for power in many places in the world (many whom have donated heavily this election cycle). As disappointing as it is in this century, I can’t name a first-world power, except for the USA, that has a black head of state in my lifetime. Not France, not England, Ireland or the UK, not the Scandinavian utopias of Denmark, Sweden or Norway, not suave and fashion leading Italy, Spain or Portugal, not our Queen-loving brothers and sisters in Canada. But we’re the racist ones, right?
A black man in the White House deserves respect, but he’s not above criticism. A woman running for president is not above criticism – the Presidency is not a participation trophy, it’s the highest office in the country. Candidates should be vetted, and like it or not, national political figures are celebrities. The media sells ads by whipping up a frenzy around celebrities, and we gobble it up and spray it out everywhere, the good, the bad and the ugly. Celebrity politicians are our new professional wrestlers – they have cults of personality, they have mortal enemies that will not so much as ever lay eyes on them, ever. Trump and Clinton are our Big Brother, and get our undying love, they’re our Emmanuel Goldstein and get our unrequited, spittle-flecked hatred. If we’re honest, we’ll admit we like it that way. But let’s get back to sexism. I was once very close friends with an Army Huey UH-1V Medevac pilot. After one of her flying evaluations by a dustoff pilot who was legendary for his exploits in Vietnam, she called me in tears. He’d been brutally rough on his evaluation. She didn’t care about the criticism, she’d learned a lot from his criticism that wan’t in any books or field manuals. What destroyed her was the compliment that he paid her – that she was the finest woman pilot he’d ever met. To her, the criticism was welcome, but being a woman had nothing to do with her flying. The criticism wasn’t sexist, but judging her abilities on the basis of her gender, that was sexist. Seeing abhorrent behavior and calling a candidate on those behaviors? Not sexist. Ignoring the bad bad judgement and behavior on the basis of the flesh suit they happened to be born into? You know where I’m going with this.
You can’t criticize or even despise a black president without being called racist? You can’t dislike a woman running for president without being called sexist? Is that what you really believe? Well, that’s mighty righteous of you. You think that if we don’t see your point of view, if we don’t love your candidate that we must be evil or stupid? Well, okay. But before you go, I have to say that I don’t think that was Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision about judging on content of character instead of the wrapper we happened to be born into. Worse yet, if you think that a black man in that kind of position of power needs your protection because of his race, or a woman running for that office needs your protection because she’s a woman, your slip may be showing.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 